Rising sea levels, blah, blah, blah

Maybe it's just me, but I found the opinion piece from retired Duke professor Orrin Pilkey published in today's News & Observer sounding the alarm about a looming catastrophe from rising sea levels along the N.C. coast a bit sad and pathetic.

Not that I question Pilkey's fervor. It's just that any article touting a global-warming apocalypse that fails to at least acknowledge Climategate is, well, incomplete.

In case you haven't heard about it, hackers released several thousand e-mails involving researchers at the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University, a hub of global warming research. The e-mails revealed a stunning level of dishonesty if not outright fraud involving researchers pushing climate catastrophe. At a minimum, the gatekeepers of the global warming debate have intentionally suppressed dissenting views and may well have fudged data and manipulated the computer code used by climate models.

Given these revelations, at a minimum, anybody touting climate disaster has an obligation to address Climategate. If Pilkey won't, the N&O should. Otherwise, somebody's hiding the full story.

UPDATE: Here's a reaction from one of the so-called "deniers," Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama at Huntsville, who spoke at a John Locke Foundation headliner in 2006, and helpfully points out that all of his research has been funded by the government.